Welcome to the home page of the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries (SSLC).
The Society was founded on 3 June 1993, and its aim, as formulated in its statutes,
is to "stimulate the appreciation of Shakespeare's works." In practice,
the Society strives to obtain its aim through publishing a journal, entitled
Folio, by organizing conferences, lectures, and other activities on a
regular basis, and in some cases through giving its support, financial and otherwise,
to relevant activities organized by others. Members of the Society are kept
informed of these activities through announcements in Folio, through
newsletters, and through this home page.

Membership

The price of one year's SSLC membership is € 16, € 5 for students.
To join the Society, please contact Paul Franssen, English Department, Utrecht
University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands, and you will receive a
copy of the most recent issue of Folio, as well as information on how to pay for your membership. Tel. +31-30-2536665; fax +31-30-2536000.
E-mail: p.j.c.m.franssen@uu.nl

Members of the SSLC receive an automatic subscription to Folio, which
is published twice a year, they are placed on the mailing list for newsletters,
and are entitled to considerable reductions in admission prices to all activities
organized or co-organized by the SSLC.

Folio

Folio, the SSLC journal, is published twice a year, once in summer and
once in the winter. Contributions are in Dutch or English. In addition to articles
on Shakespeare's works, Folio also carries reviews of Shakespeare productions,
mainly in the Netherlands and Flanders, of recent books and academic studies
concerned with Shakespeare, of translations, editions (in print or in electronic
form), and film versions of his works. Also, there are often interviews with
people who are professionally involved with Shakespeare, such as theatre makers.
Every issue of Folio includes a survey of forthcoming Shakespeare productions
in the Netherlands and Flanders over the next half year or so, and announcements
of conferences partly or wholly dedicated to Shakespeare's work.

A selection from the articles and reviews that have appeared in Folio over the last couple of years is now available on this website: to access them, please click on the blue titles in the Folio Table of Contents.

Forthcoming SSLC Activities

Searching on the Internet

The last few years have seen an explosive growth in the number of websites
partly or wholly devoted to Shakespeare. An article about this topic, entitled
"Will's Web: Surfing with Shakespeare" by Onno Kosters, was published
in Folio 3.1. The following is not intended to be a complete survey of
all the websites dedicated to Shakespeare, but merely gives some of the more prominent
sites, from which you can easily surf on to others.

A fairly extensive survey of Shakespeare on the net can be found at the
site entitled Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet. It provides
numerous links, also to material on Shakespeare's contemporaries and to electronic
editions of texts that can be downloaded from the internet. The address is:
http://daphne.palomar.edu/shakespeare

Also highly recommended is the site of Shaksper, the international
electronic conference. In addition to useful links, the website also offers an extensive number of scholarly
articles on Shakespeare. The address is http://www.shaksper.net/

In the USA, an ambitious new website has just come on-line
at http://www.playshakespeare.com.
Apart from the texts of Shakespeare's works, it offers backgrounds,
synopses, and a wealth of information about Shakespeare festivals and
national Shakespeare societies world-wide.

As for Shakespeare's Dutch stage history, information can be found in the
archives of the Dutch Theatre Institute in Amsterdam. Before a visit, it is
advisable to check their on-line catalogue for their holdings: www.tin.nl

Another site dedicated to the sonnets, but with several Dutch
translations of each sonnet side by side, has been launched by Frank
Lekens: http://www.xs4all.nl/~fmlekens/Q1609/.
If you would like to have a go at translating a sonnet yourself, Frank would
love to hear from you. Still under development, but full of promise!

As for Dutch translations of Shakespeare, there is a website
featuring extensive excerpts from Jan Jonk's version of the complete works,
at http://www.janjonk.nl/.

An annual event of specific importance to the Dutch Shakespeare-scene is the
open-air performances
of a Shakespeare-play in Diever: this year, Much Ado will be
performed. Up-to-date information can be found at
http://www.shakespearetheaterdiever.nl/.

The International Shakespeare Association, the
umbrella organization of all the various national Shakespeare-Societies,
organized its most recent World Shakespeare Congress in Brisbane Australia, in July
2006. See http://www.shakespeare2006.net/main.html
for details. The next venue, in five years time, will be Prague.

Our German sister organization, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, is the oldest Shakespeare-society
in existence; their extensive new website, which includes surveys of conferences, publications, and theatre
productions, can be found at http://www.shakespeare-gesellschaft.de.

Also relevant is our South-African sister-organisation, which is
organising an international conference in Grahamstown in June 2007,
about The International Spread of Shakespeare. See http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/isea/shake/

For Shakespeare studies and activities in a wider European framework, see
the website of the University of Basel, entitled Shakespeare in the New
Europe or SHINE: http://www.unibas.ch/shine/index.html.
In addition, there is a new website with a.o. information on past and future
conferences in the field of European Shakespeare: http://www.um.es/shakespeare/esra/

For information about English studies in the Netherlands, see the website of the
Netherlands Society for
English Studies at http://NSES.let.uu.nl/.

In addition to websites, there are electronic conferences or lists
that are partly or wholly dedicated to Shakespeare. A fairly popular list,
which is subscribed to by the most diverse people, from high school students
to celebrated academics, is Shaksper. The topics raised on Shaksper
are also highly diverse, ranging from requests for fairly elementary information
and speculations about resemblances between O.J. Simpson and Othello, to suggested
emendations in the texts of Shakespeare's plays and possibilities of interpreting
certain scenes, in an academic sense as well as in performance. Although Shaksper
is largely an American affair, there are also a lot of European members. For information on
joining Shaksper, visit their website at http://www.shaksper.net/

A more informal and low-threshold group is that offered by the search
engine Google, at www.Google.com
From the home page, surf to Google groups> humanities>
humanities.lit> humanities.lit.authors> Shakespeare.

Teaching material in the form of Shakespearean comic books, containing
both original texts and a translation into modern English, are available
from a website, www.shakespearecomics.com.
Disclaimer: we have no commercial interest in this enterprise whatsoever!

Books, DVDs, souvenirs, what have you, just about anything connected
to Shakespeare can nowadays also be ordered on-line from the Shakespeare
Bookshop belonging to the Birthplace trust in Stratford: www.shakespeare.org.uk/shopping/. Their range of books and related materials may be
smaller than that on, say, Amazon, but the survey is user-friendly, and
highly suitable for browsing. Again, we have no commercial interest in this enterprise
whatsoever and are merely mentioning this link as a service to our members.